View article

Business lawyers are often caricatured as worry-warts and naysayers, obsessing on risk, burdening their clients' dealings. While this popular portrayal is clearly misleading, 1 it rests on an intuition that we propose to take seriously: that the overstatement of legal risk may be a natural by-product of professional self-interest and self-definition. The possibility that lawyers are often tempted to act in a manner that is self-serving, rather than in their clients' best interests, is well recognized. Many of the bar's rules of professional responsibility are designed to discourage breach of the duty of loyalty, and the scholarly literature abounds with studies of the temptations to cheat their clients that lawyers face in such settings as the conduct of litigation, 2 the settlement process, 3 fees and billing, 4 and the like. Curiously, however, little if any serious attention has been given to the possibility that self-serving behavior will occur …